Effective leadership is essential to business success. As an organizational leader, you not only guide decision-making but create your company’s culture, retain its talent, and move it toward bigger, better things.
Your leadership style—the behavioral patterns consistent across your decision-making—influences your impact on your organization and team. One of the most beneficial styles to adopt is reflective leadership.
If you want to learn more about reflective leadership’s role in business, here’s an overview of its components, why it’s effective, and how to become a reflective leader.
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Reflective leadership involves self-awareness, introspection, and continuous learning and growth to make better decisions, enhance leadership skills, and improve team performance.
“Reflective leadership requires the continuous practice of reflection over time,” says Harvard Business School Professor Nien-hê Hsieh in the online course Leadership, Ethics, and Corporate Accountability. “This allows you to regularly examine and re-evaluate your decisions and responsibilities to practice, broaden, and deepen your skills, and to apply this knowledge when analyzing present situations.”
Reflective leadership also enables you to help your team grow.
“Reflective leadership is about helping others on your team or in your organization,” Hsieh says. “It’s about helping them develop their own skills in awareness, judgment, and action.”
In Leadership, Ethics, and Corporate Accountability, Hsieh delves into the reflective leadership model, a framework for conceptualizing your responsibilities as an ethical leader.
The model has four components:
- Awareness: Recognize your legal, economic, and ethical responsibilities to stakeholders.
- Judgment: Consider biases and shared concepts that influence your decision-making.
- Action: Act on your decisions in an accountable, consistent way.
- Reflection: Reflect on all three components throughout the process to learn from past experiences.
“The reflective leadership model involves not only reflection on business decisions but also continuous reflection on your own personal beliefs, goals, and commitments,” Hsieh says in the course. “These aspects of self are often significant influences on your decisions and internal guides when navigating difficult situations.”
The Importance of Reflective Leadership
Before diving into the importance of reflective leadership, it’s critical to note the pitfalls of being an inadequate leader.
According to recruitment services company Zippia, 79 percent of employees leave their companies because they don’t feel appreciated by leaders, and upwards of 69 percent believe they’d work harder if recognized. In addition, only 33 percent report feeling engaged in the workplace.
Companies also lack focus on leadership development. Zippia reports that 77 percent struggle to find and develop leaders, and only five percent implement leadership development at all levels.
Since reflective leadership focuses on continuously improving and developing, it’s one of the more effective leadership styles. By regularly reflecting on your beliefs and values and incorporating them into your actions, you can make ethical decisions and enable your company to be more purpose-driven.
“Along with responsibility, leadership brings opportunities,” Hsieh explains in Leadership, Ethics, and Corporate Accountability. “These include opportunities to make ethical decisions where someone else wouldn’t, to influence others to do the right thing, and to make a positive impact on the world.”
Reflective leadership also helps you build authentic, supportive relationships with team members and create a workplace of ethics and accountability.
If you want to adopt a reflective leadership style, here are the competencies to develop.
How to Become a Reflective Leader
Be Self-Reflective
Self-reflection is at reflective leadership’s core. According to Leadership, Ethics, and Corporate Accountability, you can practice self-reflection by:
- Reviewing, analyzing, and evaluating your decisions—in the moment and over time.
- Continuously deepening your awareness and self-knowledge.
- Developing a general framework for judgment.
- Improving your capacity for action and leadership.
Leading with self-reflection won’t just help you learn from past experiences but also encourage and enable your team members to adopt reflective mentalities.
Identify Your Commitments
Knowing your commitments is also essential to effective leadership.
“It’s important to identify and define your own commitments,” Hsieh says in Leadership, Ethics, and Corporate Accountability, “both to set a baseline for what you will and won’t do and to evaluate and clarify your thoughts, opinions, and feelings when making decisions.”
To create that baseline, Hsieh recommends asking the following questions:
- What’s core to my identity?
- What lines or boundaries won’t I cross?
- What kind of life do I want to live?
- What kind of leader do I want to be?
By identifying your commitments, you can better guide yourself and your team.
Consider Your Accountability
Becoming a reflective leader also requires accountability to successfully execute on your values and implement them into action plans.
This refers to the reflective leadership model’s “action” step—putting your decisions into practice in a way that’s accountable and consistent with your responsibilities.
“When leading reflectively, straightforward action planning may not be enough,” Hsieh says in Leadership, Ethics, and Corporate Accountability. “An accountable leader will go beyond just answering ‘How will we do it?’ to ask ‘How can I do it accountably?’”
Reflective Leadership Training for Businesses
By incorporating your values into your leadership style, you can learn from your experiences on a deeper level and develop into a better leader.
One way to gain the skills and frameworks to succeed long term is by taking an online course, such as Leadership, Ethics, and Corporate Accountability. Through a dynamic, interactive learning experience, the course provides the opportunity to apply the reflective leadership model to real-world business ethics challenges.
Are you ready to become a reflective leader? Apply to Leadership, Ethics, and Corporate Accountability—one of our online leadership and management courses—and download our free e-book on effective leadership.
